A bit of Chapter 3 of “This Unhappy Planet”
This Unhappy Planet is my new novel. You can get it “here.”
It’s the tale of four friends in California who take it in turns to be crazy at the end of the ’00s.
Here is a chunk I enjoyed writing
It’s interesting to watch your wife. Getting a little notebook, furtively capturing phrases, doing little sketches of her. Combing through her web-browsing history.
Jack had had a sense of this before when he had noticed how much pleasure he took in catching sight of Allie from afar: like when they were going to meet outside a store or whatever and he would see her in the crowd before she saw him. Her big sunglasses, floppy tied-up hair, swan neck, the way she carried her handbag low like Peter Hook’s bass. It was enchanting: a mix of flying over your own house in a plane and of remembering the exciting early unfamiliar days of a relationship. Cynically, also, she was not talking.
This was different, though. She was a case study and he was an anthropologist. That could be sexy too. A mud hut, the Nile Delta. She comes from the river… still wet, the drips glistened on her tribal markings.
Or, she’s driving the car and a homeless guy is at the light and instead of wasting a five on him like she used to, she instead looks in his eyes for a good ten seconds and says, “You need to figure out what you really want. God bless.”
Hmm. Hoboes are just not sexy… unless possibly if you’re a serial killer or something.
No trackbacks yet.